The Trump administration’s rhetoric echoes the same old fantasy of racial purity that animated the 20th-century right.
On an otherwise unremarkable spring day, the Trump administration’s lawless assault on the rights of immigrants was interrupted by a government-chartered plane landing at Dulles International Airport. In a revealing reverse-image set piece, some 50 white Afrikaner immigrants from South Africa had arrived, in pursuit of an array of generous resettlement provisions. In February, Trump had signed an executive order granting them streamlined refugee status and a smooth path to US citizenship. The newcomers were feted with welcoming statements from the president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and scores of MAGA-aligned commentators and pundits.
The same day that the Afrikaner “refugees” were getting the red-carpet treatment, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was ending temporary protected status for immigrants from Afghanistan—many of whom had assisted the US war effort there and would thus face potential reprisals from the Taliban should they be deported. At a press conference after the Afrikaners’ flight landed, a reporter asked State Department spokesman Christopher Landau about the vast disparity in treatment between white immigrants with dubious claims of violent persecution in their homeland, and a group of their nonwhite counterparts who were exposed to real personal and political danger. Landau replied that “one of the criteria” in assigning refugee status to an immigrant population is making sure they can be “assimilated into our country.”
There’s a world of hidden presumptions in Landau’s response, but its core logic keys into a long-standing obsession on the MAGA right: the notion that the members of America’s leadership caste are the righteous guardians of a Western civilization in imminent peril of contamination from within and siege from without. The exchange was reminiscent of a similar outburst from the proto-Trumpian presidential candidate Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s: “If we had to take a million immigrants in—say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen—and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate, and would cause less problems?”
Buchanan was drawing on a strain of white reactionary thought that dates back to the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, when the overlapping scourges of mass immigration and race-mixing haunted the American patrician mind. Madison Grant’s unhinged yet enormously influential 1916 diatribe, The Passing of the Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History, makes an argument that is effectively indistinguishable from Trump’s continual plaint that if the barbarian hordes aren’t subdued and/or banished by any means necessary, “we won’t have a country anymore.”
As the subtitle of Grant’s tract suggests, the case for racialized exclusion, discrimination, and eugenic guardianship has always rested on the myth of a sanitized and glorified racial past. The notion of the imperiled West seized the right-wing imagination with acute force in the 1920s; as the cultural historian Warren Susman observed, that decade’s “great fear” was “whether any great industrial and democratic mass society can maintain a significant level of civilization, and whether mass education and mass communication will allow any civilization to survive.” The non-white and foreign-born populations then migrating into American cities were the all-too-vivid face of this threat for the self-appointed guardians of white European civilization, leading to the enactment of harsh new immigration restrictions and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
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The rationale for the Afrikaner refugee policy is likewise steeped in the argot of civilizational peril; in announcing the arrival of the immigrants, Trump dubbed them victims of a genocide, reprising an empirically vacuous 2018 broadcast from then–Fox News host Tucker Carlson about alleged racial terror campaigns against white South African farmers. (Such rhetoric is especially grotesque for an administration imprisoning and seeking to deport critics of the actual genocide that Israel is carrying out in Gaza.) According to The Washington Post, a State Department memo referred to Afrikaner farmers who were said to “have witnessed or experienced extreme violence with a racial nexus,” even though, the Post noted, the episodes cited concerned “home invasions, murders or carjackings that took place up to 25 years ago.”
But as the Madison Grants of the world have made clear for a century now, confirmable facts play no role in grand narratives of civilizational peril. Hence the spectacle of reformed Never Trumper JD Vance extolling the need for native populations to outbreed the foreign-born competition and offering a Buchananite gloss on the phony Haitian invasion of Springfield, Ohio: “Should we drop 20,000 people from a radically different culture in a small Ohio town in a matter of a few years?”
MAGA’s crown prince of declensionist civilization rhetoric, however, is South African centibillionaire Elon Musk. Musk, together with the other key South African–aligned Trump minions, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, is a sworn foe of all things woke, DEI-inflected, and otherwise irksome to light-hued Silicon Valley edgelords. He’s also a hard-core connoisseur of civilizational doomsterism.
“I listen to podcasts about the fall of civilizations to go to sleep,” Musk said in an interview with the Trump-pardoned Wall Street felon Michael Milken. He urged Milken’s MAGA-loyal listeners to adjourn briskly to procreate at least three times, expanding his own personal breeding project—as of publication, the count was 14—on a vaster scale. The threat to civilization, Musk went on to say, is at the root of his obsession with colonizing Mars. “If you don’t become a multi-planet civilization, then you are simply waiting around until you die from a self-inflicted wound or some natural disaster,” the self-described history buff exhorted.
If Musk had bothered to learn any actual history, he’d recognize that rhetoric as the paranoid fantasy of right-wing eugenicists from a century ago. To cite another well-worn MAGA refrain: Sad!
